Where the Cows Lick Pillars of Salt

Sorry I did not come by to weep with everyone on Tuesday night. On Monday, I had a 2-phone-battery conversation with somone who thinks going into drug rehab is somehow a service that benefits ME, and I decided to get up the next day and get out of Miami.

Ocala. That’s what it’s all about.

To recap, I went to Winter Haven to help launch a new church, and I felt like a runaway slave. Afterward, I started thinking about moving north. Then my buddy Mike started talking about Ocala. Either that, or I came up with the idea myself. Can’t remember. I started looking at Ocala real estate on the computer, with the intensity of an Obama campaign staffer researching Romney’s overdue library books. I found out that you can get a magnificent farm up there for the cost of a little-bitty house in Coral Gables. I’ve been making lists and looking at Google Earth a lot.

Originally, I thought I would go alone, because I didn’t think my father would ever leave this place. Then he started coming around. That was great, because I refuse to have a mortgage, and if we both go, we can have a much nicer property.

I checked out fourteen places, from two acres to forty, if I recall correctly. If I had to describe this area, I’d say it looks a great deal like the area outside Lexington, Kentucky, only without the backwardness and bigotry. I hope. Mike says everyone got along great at the racially mixed school he went to in Ocala.

I had read that the dirt up there was too sandy for growing things, but that’s not true. I saw all sorts of hay, and people were growing stuff in their yards. It may not be the finest dirt on earth, but clearly, it works. We don’t really have dirt in Miami. A lot of this area has a few inches of white sand over oolite (coral rock), and when they build houses, sometimes they add a little muck from the Everglades, so you end up with grey sand. To plant a tree in my yard, you have to use a mattock and cut a hole in the rock. I’ve pretty much had it with our dirt.

I was able to move between properties ten miles apart in about as many minutes. As a victim of Miami, I can’t even express my joy. The traffic here is nearly unbearable, and the worst part about it is that when you finally get out of the car, you’re still in Miami.

There are actual hills up there. At one point, while driving, I felt pressure in my ears. I didn’t think that was possible in Florida.

I also enjoyed hearing English. Diversity is swell, but I get very, very, very tired of playing charades to make myself understood in the United States of America, by individuals who have been here since Carter.

People get mad at me because I can’t understand their bad English. One of the biggest night school subjects here is ESOL, or English for Speakers of Other Languages. That’s great, but they haven’t gotten around to adding UESOL, or Understanding English for Speakers of Other Languages. Funny thing, I find it easier to talk to relatively new Haitians than Cubans who have been here 20 years. The Haitians learn English very quickly, and when their English isn’t good (very rare), I can talk to them in French.

Anyway, I do look forward to saying everything ONCE.

The Romney signs…they were everywhere. I saw a few Obamas, but not enough to matter. Mike says a politician who runs as a Democrat in Marion County has no shot. I love that.

I would say the Ocala area looks, well, not hectic. I suppose it could get dull. But I don’t do much anyway, in terms of going out on the town. I don’t like movies because my feet stick to the floor and people yap in Spanish. I don’t like restaurants because I cook better than they do. Clubs…don’t even joke. I can generally be found at home, at church, or running errands. My assumption is that if I join a good church up there, I’ll have a social circle within two to three months, and after that, life will be much as it is here, only without the unpleasant sensation of being in Miami.

I saw a lot of wonderful things. Barbecue restaurants, plural. All sorts of businesses related to farming. They would be helpful to a tool-oriented person hoping to get into things like canning food and maintaining a workshop. There’s a Krystal restaurant in town. They don’t have a Costco, and that will smart, but you can’t have everything. There’s a Gordon Food Service 60 miles away. I wanted to be remote, so I shouldn’t complain.

It may be hard to find a place that doesn’t have horse paraphernalia. I am not going to have much use for a barn. I know people will say I can put a workshop in it, but horse barns are cut up into little stalls. I think it would be pretty hard to convert one. Mike says we can rent stalls to people. Basically, they would be paying to give me handy manure.

I don’t know much about maintaining rural property, even though I’ve owned a ton of it in common with family. As far as I know, you don’t have to do much with barns and land. We did virtually nothing to the farms we sold, and they held their value. I don’t want to end up bush-hogging thirty or forty acres once a month, or mowing a giant yard.

I’m going to try to put together a plan and get this done. Things are probably going to get very bad now that we have chosen Obama a second time, and if a depression hits the cities, the entitlement flash mobs will be invading houses en masse, raping, killing, and stealing. Or “stealing BACK,” as they would say. Places like Ocala will be very dangerous for that crowd. Up there, a guy with scoped rifles (and friends with scoped rifles) might have a real advantage over liberal dentists and accountants in Coral Gables. I guess it sounds like I’m planning to move so I can shoot a bunch of people. No, but I don’t want to be an easy target when the anti-Christian, anti-conservative Kristallnacht comes.

I guess I should write about the election.

Many conservatives are questioning the legitimacy of Obama’s victory. Let me give you a bitter pill. It’s completely legitimate. Unless they turn up an extremely unlikely election-rigging scam which spans many states, no reasonable person will ever be able to deny that we chose this man. We know what he is, and we want it.

People are saying he won because the media didn’t go after him. I’m sure that helped him, but his screwups have been covered fairly well. Everyone who owns a PC or TV should be aware of his failures and negative traits. People claim he won because the public has drifted left. I very much doubt it. I don’t think the public is smart enough to know what left is.

Obama won because a big percentage of the electorate is ignorant and/or not very bright. Grab a typical college graduate and ask him if he has any idea why entitlements lead to unemployment and low productivity, and chances are, he won’t have a clue. The people who decided the election were not favoring leftism. They went for the guy they liked best. They saw the debates, and they thought about things like hair and suits, and at the end, they decided Obama made them feel better.

People who are obsessed with politics think everyone worries about things like the proper level of taxation and the size of our military. In reality, the average voter votes based on instinct, which is something that exists to help creatures who lack the ability or inclination to reason.

Ronald Reagan ran against Carter. He projected confidence and charm, so he won twice. Bush I ran against Dukakis, who looked short, dumpy, and timid, so he won once. Clinton charmed female voters, so he beat Bush I. Bush II seemed less crazy than Gore and less snotty than Kerry, so he got eight years.

I know it’s not really that simple. Policies matter a little. But it’s very obvious that we are as willing to vote for extreme leftists as right-of-center conservatives, so I don’t believe substance means much.

Anyway, Obama is the President, and he is the true choice of the people, so get over it.

As to why Obama won people’s hearts, I believe the answer is supernatural. We have killed tens of millions of unborn babies (and quite a few that were born), we have turned against Israel, a huge percentage of us support perversion, we think fornication is a God-given right, and we are becoming cruel and extremely proud. We pray less than ever, and church attendance is dropping. We are becoming God’s enemies. In my opinion, our reward is national decline. God has blinded us to Obama’s revolting shortcomings, so we did something no reasonable nation would do. We chose Obama not once, but twice.

I was highly disturbed when I saw the election results. I was in a hotel room, trying to sleep, and I stupidly forgot to turn off my phone. People woke me up more than once, calling to express their horror. At some point in the wee hours, I gave up and looked at Drudge. Arrgh.

Before the election, I spent a great deal of time in prayer. I felt great faith pushing through me. I thought a Romney victory was very likely. When I saw that I was wrong, the thing that disturbed me most was not the Obama victory, but the fact that I had believed he would lose. It’s very unusual for me to have strong faith for a result and then to see something different happen. It affects my relationship with God. I will never doubt him or criticize him, but a failure like this makes me reevaluate the things I do in my walk of faith. Am I praying correctly? Am I interpreting what I feel correctly? Is there something else I should be doing? If I’m wrong about this, what else am I wrong about?

I believe God sometimes sets his seal on things. By that, I mean he decrees that a thing will be done, with complete finality. He doesn’t say “if” or “maybe.” It’s done. Period. I believe he reveals this to some people during prayer. Sometimes the rush of faith that follows a request is so powerful, it’s overwhelming. There’s no way to deny it.

This happened to me back when an ex-girlfriend was filing nutty lawsuits against me. One day I was praying in my truck, and a wave of faith hit me, and I grabbed the console between the seats because I felt I would be pushed over if I didn’t have something to hold. After that, I knew I was going to win, and I was right. On top of that, I asked for very specific things in the last two hearings, and I got them.

I’ve also had it happen with regard to other things I’ve asked for. I asked God to do everything within his power to get my father and sister to accept Christ, be baptized with the Spirit, pray in tongues, be freed from their iniquities, and live in power and blessings, and my faith told me it would be done. God didn’t say they would change; he just said he would do everything possible. They still have free will.

I have found that usually, a strong rush of faith that doesn’t reach the threshold of a sealed answer will still get the job done. But sometimes–I think–a small amount of doubt is enough to sink the ship. I think that’s what happened with the election. I felt great faith, but I also felt something pushing back, and I wasn’t able to get to the point where doubt was completely destroyed. It may sound like I’m giving a lot of importance to my prayers, but my religion tells me the prayer of one man held the sun still in the sky, and I am not willing to limit God.

I think that in the future, I’ll have to be careful not to conclude that something is sealed when it isn’t. I also think that when I’m not sure a thing is sealed, and it’s an important matter, I should continue in prayer until I get resolution. That’s my take for now, anyway.

For a long time, I’ve prayed for God to bless and empower Christians, not America in general. I won’t pray for America’s success because America has been harmed by false prosperity. When things go well, we do what the ancient Jews did. We turn away from God, credit ourselves, and sink into sin. I see that happening around me, so I have prayed that God would bring down ungodly people who are in power and strengthen believers. I believe this will help people turn back to God, where they will work to achieve his ends. They will work as they were intended, with his authority, to increase his kingdom in the earth. I think the Obama disaster is God granting prayers like mine. Like the Hebrews who feasted on quail till they puked, we’re going to feast on our own conceit. God will give us the incompetent, dangerous leaders our egos tell us we need, and they will lead us over cliffs until we repent. That’s my best guess.

God is taking away the things we believe in. He is taking away every stable investment. Stocks are shaky, and Obama’s tax changes will kill them. Gold is volatile. Real estate could plummet again at any time. Even cash is sinking. Thanks to Bernanke’s backdoor socialism, if you sell your risky stocks and put the money in the bank, you still lose value. It looks as though a time is coming when everything we cling to will turn on us, and unless we have a good grip on God, we will sink.

This is why I like the rural-compound-with-no-mortgage idea. Little properties in places like Manhattan and Coral Gables are only valuable in good times. They have no real value. A Park Avenue condo, for example, is a tiny box with no soil, even if it costs ten million dollars. Right now it’s valuable because there are a lot of people who have money. When things go bad, people won’t want little boxes. They’ll want acreage, so they can grow things and defend themselves. Bernanke can wreck the dollar, but he can’t dry up your well or prevent potatoes from growing in your yard.

I keep meeting people who have Ocala connections. Mike was the first. I went to church and mentioned it, and I found out that one of the armorbearers already owns 20 acres there and wants to move, but his wife won’t let him. He has a carry permit, and he’s learning to can! One of my best friends, a former armorbearer, is married to a woman who has family in Marion County. She has wanted to move there for a while now. The other day, I mentioned the idea to a friend who used to be part of my prayer group at Trinity. He goes to New Dawn now. He says he went to high school in Ocala. To me, these things seem like confirmation.

I think God is probably going to protect Christians in the years ahead. I think we will do better than ever, while the country sinks. I think Israel will also prosper. America is abandoning Israel, and God never will, so he will find other ways to bless his nation. If Christians and Israel do well, it will serve to ground persecution. No surprise there. We’ve been told to expect it.

When I say “Christians,” I mean charismatics who really know God. I don’t think he’s going to do much for people who don’t have the Holy Spirit, because they don’t hear his guidance as well. They say 20 million confused people who claim to be evangelicals voted for Obama. I think that should tell you how lost a so-called Christian can be.

If I learn anything new, I’ll let you know.

Them’s Fightin’ Words!

A certain blogress grand diva has impugned my culinary skills by pointing out that my recipe for BBQ beans starts with canned beans and ketchup! Oh, the treachery! She says her beans have to be cooked from scratch!

You know, there are some things you shouldn’t try to cook from scratch. Try making Rice Krispies Treats from scratch some day. Not going to happen. I make my own guitars, amps, bullets, beer…but dang, I’m not going to make my own ketchup or grow beans again. The climate down here kills everything. I couldn’t grow tomatoes if I wanted to.

I respect the whole SHTF movement, but you pretty much have to take over a county if you really want to be self-sufficient. Even in the old days, people bought things like sugar, coffee, and flour.

Anyway, I will defend my beans to the death. They are totally righteous.

Food for Faith

Thought I would write a little about my continuing dehydrator adventure.

Yesterday I dried papaya. I have some trees, but I don’t eat the fruit, because it smells a little bit like dog poop. I wondered if dehydration would change that. I suppose I’m picking the papayas too late, and that’s why they stink, but it seems odd to pick a fruit that isn’t sweet yet.

Anyway, I sliced up a papaya and tossed the chunks in lime juice and simple syrup. After about seven hours in the machine, they were dried up to nothing. I tried one, and sure enough, it doesn’t stink like it did before. So now I have a use for all the papayas that come off the trees.

Funny thing…the product is not like the dried papaya you get in stores. It really shrivels up. I’m wondering if there is a difference between “dried” and “dehydrated.” Guess I’ll have to figure that out.

I have not made jerky yet. I think I’ll get ten boliches (eye round roasts) and dry them. It would probably be best to smoke them, too, but maybe I can fake that with Liquid Smoke and avoid the aggravation.

Mike says he has a yogurt machine. Evidently you can make your own yogurt for a small fraction of the price of store yogurt. How exciting. I guess it’s a big blessing, but I’ve never been a huge yogurt fan. I always identify yogurt with the feminist/greenie/Mac/vegetarian lifestyle.

You can use a dehydrator to make yogurt, and you can even turn the yogurt into dry sheets. Weird.

Yesterday I realized I can make shucky beans in the dehydrator. Man, that would be sweet. I need to find a farmer’s market and load up on green beans. Or I could just chicken out and hit Costco. I don’t know if the beans would brown up the way they do when you dry them on strings.

I just got an idea for food storage: corned beef. I look up a recipe on the Cook’s Illustrated site, and it says corned beef is just cured beef. You stick it in a sealed bag with a salt and seasoning preparation, and you let it sit for 7 days. If that’s all it is, it’s perfect for freezing. Seal everything in a bag, refrigerate for a week, and then freeze. That should work, shouldn’t it?

I Googled flooding and crops again, to see if Perry Stone is right about his vision of upcoming food problems. Things don’t look too good. We have no corn reserves, and the weather is not great. The food situation in China is bad. I guess this year will teach me whether I should pay attention to this man’s visions in the future.

The dehydrator looks like a good investment. I still want to get out of here and put some land around me, but until that happens, I think I’ll be fine with stored eats. And I didn’t lose anything by buying a refurb unit. It looks and works like new.

Mike is jealous. Oh well. Now he has something to put on his shopping list.

Food Hoard Grows

My Excalibur food dehydrator showed up this weekend. Yesterday I fired it up, dehydrating a bunch of Granny Smith apples. I bought four dozen at Costco, and I did two dozen a week or so ago, and the aggravation was what led me to order the dehydrator.

It took seven hours to dehydrate apple slices prepared with a slicing and peeling machine. I’m sure hand-sliced apples would be different, because the thickness would vary. The machines make slices about 1/4″ thick.

The dehydrator expels wet air from the front, and water will condense on anything close to the machine. I guess there is no way to avoid that.

I didn’t dip the apples in lemon juice or sodium bisulfite or anything else that might inhibit oxidation. I wanted them to taste like the apples my grandmother used to dry. Apples that are heavily treated don’t have the same flavor. I figured my apples would come out brown, like the ones I dried in the SUV and oven, but they came out very white.

Here’s the surprising thing: the flavor is amazing. It’s almost like a green apple Jolly Rancher candy. Very strong, and extremely sweet. I can’t figure that out. I don’t know if they’ll make good dried-apple pies, but they’re great to eat as a snack.

The dehydrator has plastic shelves that slide out, and each shelf has a sheet of plastic mesh on it to hold food. You can put the trays in the dishwasher (top rack), but the mesh has to be washed by hand. This is a major pain. But if Perry Stone is right, and food gets expensive, the effort of keeping my dehydrator clean will seem trivial.

I look forward to drying some bananas in it. My trees are producing well.

This dehydrator is a refurb, but I can’t see anything wrong with it. I think I made a good choice. You can get a cheaper Chinese knockoff, but I wanted a warranty and decent customer service.

Son of Man, Can These Dry Bananas Live?

I have given up. I hate blowing money on things I should be able to make, but drying apples in my dad’s SUV is too slow, so I bought a dehydrator. I got a refurb Excalibur. It ought to do the job.

I put a dozen sliced apples in the SUV on a sliding door screen and gave it two days, but the apples just were not dry enough. Maybe it would work in the summer, but I can’t keep fooling around, trying to get it right.

I was looking at dehydrators online, and I felt stupid, but then I thought about all the stuff I throw out. Most of my peppers and bananas end up rotting because I don’t have any place to put them. I never eat my papayas, because they smell funny, but if they were dried, I think that problem would go away.

Bananas are fantastic. They keep you regular and they taste good. But what do you do when twenty pounds of them get ripe over three days?

Ooooh…pineapples. I wonder how hard those are to grow. Dried pineapples are great, and I have a special culinary use for the fresh stuff.

I guess now I can look into jerky. I don’t even know what cuts to use. It would sure beat paying tons of money for the protein bars I eat when I work at church.

La Niña Knows Who’s the Man

The Holy Spirit is God’s Internet. He arranges us in order and coordinates what we do, even when one of us has no idea what the other is up to. The more Spirit-filled the church gets, the stronger and more obvious the coordination gets.

For a long time, I’ve been hearing about “preparation.” Christians all over the place are looking for rural land. They’re buying guns, tools, and nonperishable food. They’re learning how to take care of themselves. It’s spreading to people, even before they know what’s happening. It has already hit me pretty hard.

I live in a suburb where the fungi and bugs and viruses are so thick, it’s almost impossible to grow things. Citrus is dying (not just here, but worldwide). Tomatoes can’t escape the leaf wilt virus. Nonetheless, I have banana trees now, bearing like crazy. I have one magnificent mango tree and another one which is improving all the time. I have all the hot peppers I could possibly want. I have a strong, healthy lychee tree.

I also have unbelievable tools, plenty of ammunition, a good variety of weapons, and a diesel pickup. Plus two freezers.

Today I got a call from Mike. He has moved back to the DC area, near the remarkable church I wrote about last year. Now he lives in a home that has half an acre of ground. While we were talking about God, I suggested he watch Perry Stone. I mentioned Perry Stone’s vision about future crop failures due to flooding. He cut me off and started telling me how he had been buying bulk food. Mind you, he’s not even tuned into the movement yet. He just felt like it was something he needed to do.

He bought a lot of flour. He’s getting containers. He’s starting seeds for the yard. He just feels like bad times are ahead.

There has to be something to it.

I’m going to be sitting pretty, provided the food shortages aren’t prolonged. I’m stocking up. I ordered a tasty Kentucky ham, plus some sorghum and blackberry jam. I have boxes from Gordon Food Service; I’m putting away pizza sauce, pasta, flour, yeast, and other things. I plan to freeze mozzarella, so while other people are paying out the nose for bad food, I’ll be able to pop out $2 pizzas that beat anything you can buy locally. If there are problems with the power grid, I’m in trouble, but other than that, I’m cool.

I’m Googling “La Niña.” I know we’re having a La Niña year, so I wondered if La Niña causes flooding. Sure enough, it does. At least in some places. Look it up. In October, FEMA warned people in the Pacific Northwest to buy flood insurance.

They ought to quit with “La Niña” and “El Niño” and call the whole business “El Padre.” He’s the one pulling the strings.

I’ve been trying to figure out what to buy. Surely rain won’t hurt every type of food. For example, fish don’t mind rain. On the other hand, when one type of food gets scarce, people move to the others, so they get pressured, too.

God is shaking the world. He’s slapping us awake. Those who will listen will get into gear and start conforming to his principles. They’ll line themselves up with his will and get in the blessing and protection pipeline. Everyone else will have problems. They built their houses on sand, and when things shake, well, look at California. Only things built in accordance with God’s wishes will remain.

What will the result be? Persecution, probably. “My Christian wingnut neighbor bought all the meat and froze it! My Christian wingnut neighbor has a bunch of guns! Look how these hoarding parasites are living while we’re suffering!” It will be like post-Versailles Germany. And Jews are eventually going to get it, too. They are part of God’s plan, so the spirit of Antichrist will keep trying to kill them off, as it did in Germany and Austria (as it does in Gaza). Jewish names like “Madoff” and “Stearns” and “Geithner” and “Bernanke” will be persecution code words. There is a reason Jews are figuring so heavily in our economic disasters.

Some people think the Rapture will be a magical event so sudden and inexplicable, it will essentially force people to believe. They’ll see that millions of Christians are missing, and they’ll have no earthly explanation. Does that make sense to you? I have to wonder. I don’t think God would make it that easy. It would be unlike him. I think we may leave the earth in a wave of executions. I don’t know. I’m not a prophecy expert. Maybe the Bible makes it clear that we’ll just zoom up out of ourselves, instantly, but I don’t recall reading anything like that.

My guess is that the enemy’s people will eventually get the upper hand, and we’ll be murdered in large groups, just like the Jews were. After all, we’ll be “the problem.” This is how the political left will see us. It will be like Cambodia and Cuba. At least I suspect it will.

Christians like to talk about claiming victory and defeating every enemy and so on, but the Bible makes it clear that we do not always win. The spirits that hate us are extremely powerful, and God has not chosen to give us an instant or complete victory over all of them. The battle is still going on. Peter was tortured to death, and Paul was beheaded. I think a solid Christian will live in victory for the majority of his life, but that doesn’t mean you won’t die at the point of a sword somewhere down the line.

The Revelation says that even the two witnesses who are full of God’s power will by martyred. The Antichrist will succeed in murdering them. They’ll be resurrected and assumed into heaven, but no matter how you slice it, they will be killed. If they can’t hold off defeat indefinitely, why should the rest of us expect to do better?

I’ll bet the unsaved start rounding us up and slaughtering us, possibly in the name of their gay, non-judgmental, abortion-loving “god,” and they’ll celebrate over our dead bodies, using our stolen wealth. And then comes the Tribulation, and God’s wrath will make them all want to die.

I don’t know if it will happen in the US. Perry Stone talks of a prophecy about an army of interceders (“intercessors” sounds vulgar to me) who will succeed in getting God to restore America. That would be nice, but my guess is that it would come with a serving of chastisement dwarfing what we’ve seen so far.

People generally don’t turn to God out of gratitude. They don’t get everything they want and then show up in church to pass it out and praise the Lord. We turn back to the Lord after severe beatings caused by our stupidity. That’s my situation, and it’s the most common pattern for Christians. So if suffering is ahead, it will surely bring a good harvest.

I read something interesting in Perry Stone’s magazine this month. He’s a buddy of many of the prominent prosperity preachers, and while he’s not in the same category, he does teach that God will give us “shalom,” which includes having our needs met abundantly. In his magazine, he said something that flies in the face of the over-the-top prosperity gospel. He said that if God didn’t reward our offerings here on earth, it meant we were getting heavenly rewards instead. Not “as well,” mind you. Instead.

I don’t think his friends would be happy to read that. There are still a lot of people out there telling Christians they should all be rich, and that “sowing seed gifts” into the “good soil” of their embarrassing ministries will make it happen. I’m glad to see a popular minister shooting that filth down. The mindless prosperity nuts will be the Christian Madoffs, justifying our persecution in the future.

I’m here to tell you, God will not instantly reward financial gifts with “hundredfold” returns in kind. It has never happened to me. Not once. My needs are met, and I’m fine, but if the TV-evangelist, moneycentric gospel were true, I’d be as rich as…a TV evangelist. God is not an enabler, so I think he resists giving you stuff you will use to destroy yourself, and money can be as bad a poison as arsenic. If you want it so you can have a third helipad in front of your orange mansion, it’s probably not good for you. If you want it so you will have the means and the freedom to complete your mission, there is probably no limit to what will come.

I think money is like food. It’s supposed to serve its purpose and pass through you. If you hold onto too much of it, you just end up full of fat and poop. Constipation and obesity are powerful symbols of the things that go wrong with immature Christians.

Not that I know what it’s like to be one of those. Oh, no. But I have heard about them.

I’m going to run to Costco and get some apples for drying. The Bible says that in the days of famine, I will be satisfied, and I think I will be even more satisfied if I have dried apples for pie.

Delicacy

I got my cranberry sauce, cranberry relish, and pumpkin pies made. I stuck a new ingredient in the relish, and it made a huge difference. I think it’s new, although knowing me, I may have done the same thing last year.

I have two pones of cornbread mashed up in a pot with sage, salt, pepper, fried onions, too much butter, and some other stuff. It’s so good I could eat it right now, cold and wet though it is.

I decided to use some of my precious shucky beans. I grew these a few years back and dried them myself.

These will be incredible. If you’ve never had them, go get some fresh green beans, remove the strings, dry them strung on threads, and cook them in a few months. These will soak overnight, and then tomorrow I’ll toss the water, replace it, add salt pork, and simmer them.

What a joy it is to have shucky beans on hand! I probably have the only shucky beans within 800 miles.

I thought Thanksgiving would be boring, but it’s starting to look like it will be a fantastic meal.

More of All the Good Stuff

Yes, I have too many bananas.

I stuck some banana and plantain trees in the yard. The plantains don’t do all that well, probably because I am too lazy to go buy horse manure. The bananas do well enough to cause me problems. I don’t know what to do with them.

Today I’m baking banana nut bread, to see if I can make it good enough for the Trinity church cafe. I started with the same old stale recipe everyone thinks their grandma invented. I added allspice, and I jacked up the other spices. I also used Mike’s secret ingredient to make the cake moister and tastier. And I substituted brown sugar for white.

I think it should be very good. I’ll know pretty soon. After that, I have to figure out what to put on top of it.

More

The banana nut bread is pretty amazing. The added spices woke it up, and Mike’s mystery ingredient improved the texture a great deal. The outer crust is a little chewy now, and the whole thing is moist.

Photos:

This is good enough for church. I can double the salt and maybe make the loaves smaller, so there’s more crust, but other than that, it’s ready.

I’ll have to figure out a topping.

What will I do if people get hooked and the banana trees crap out?

Problem for another day.

More

Oh, man. This stuff is too good. I may have to throw it out in self-defense.

Thanks for the recipe, Lord. Now save me from it.

The Internet Rocks

I found free horse manure on Craigslist! Am I wrong to be happy about this?

This has to be the ultimate win/win transaction.

My House Needs Fiber

I had a moment of clarity last night, unfortunately. It can be very relaxing to be wrong and not know it, so it’s always upsetting when I get an epiphany.

I had the TV on because one of the birds was out of the cage, and I happened to see a show called “Hoarders.” It’s about people who fill their houses with junk, until the rats take over and the kids have to sleep on piles of boxes.

The show bugged me. I’m not a true hoarder, but I’m related to one, and I have lots of hobbies, and I’m absent-minded. Put it all together, and you end up with a person with lots of junk, who puts stuff down in the wrong places and forgets it’s there for weeks or months. Hoarding Lite.

I got up and started relocating things. I had a pile of books and gun parts by my bed. I made room in a closet and stored it. I took tool-related items off the dining room table and put them in the garage. I threw out a number of stupid and worthless items.

Of course, I will need all of those items very badly today. That’s how decluttering works. As soon as the garbage truck drives away, you need whatever is in it.

I hate clutter. It’s like living in a little dirty crevice. It probably raises your blood pressure. But I have a clutter-prone personality. It’s like Felix and Oscar are in my head, duking it out like Rock’em Sock’em Robots.

I have a feeling that the Holy Spirit reduces clutter. Hear me out. When you’re not living for God, you do stupid things with your time and money. You will wander down fruitless paths, involving yourself in futile pursuits. That’s because only God can guide you in the direction you’re supposed to take. Result? You end up with stuff you weren’t supposed to have. Not just stuff, but time obligations. For example, you may give up church because your talented kid has sports practice every day, or simply because you want to squander time watching football on TV. You might end up devoting three hours a night to drinking beer. You may find yourself at a strip bar three times a week, blowing your money.

When God takes over, your priorities and desires change with time. Suddenly, you don’t need an entire closet for your porn collection. Or, like me, you may want to get rid of your delicious Cuban cigars. You find yourself selling things and giving things away. Life becomes more streamlined. You start discarding the things Paul referred to as “dung” so you can make room for the pearl of great price.

I still have a rolling toolbox full of gun stuff by the dining table, and a lot of my canning supplies are sitting on it. I have to move that to the garage. I have to throw out or give away some of the garage objects I will never need. I think it’s safe to throw out my old PC cabinet, and I need to Craigslist my brewing kegs.

I really need to get rid of the Super Genie Lift I inherited from one of my dad’s tenants. A guy at my church said they’ll take it, but it may be ten years before they get around to coming for it.

One of the reasons I don’t like Miami is that there is no space here. I’d like to have a home with an outbuilding for my hobbies. Here, that would run maybe three million dollars. A hundred miles north, maybe two hundred and fifty thousand. Cities are for limited people. If your only hobbies are TV and clubbing, Miami is perfect for you. Add three hobbies, and you’re out of luck. You need to move and get more room.

Last night I thought about my grandfather’s house in Kentucky. It had five bedrooms, including a little spare bedroom that held some of his guns and my grandmother’s sewing stuff. It had a big kitchen, a full dining room, a full living room, a big den, a second den in the basement, a second kitchen in the basement, tons of extra basement square footage, a big foyer, and three baths. It also had a tool shed and a barn, plus a carport and a concrete patio.

Mind you, this was not a mansion. It was just a nice red brick home. It brought $120,000 when the heirs sold it.

THAT is living. Bring your tools. Bring your cooking equipment. Buy three smokers. Get four gun safes. Get a bass boat and an RV and five motorcycles. No problem!

My idea of an ideal home is a three-bedroom CBS house with a big commercial-style kitchen, terrazzo floors, and no curtains, with nothing on the walls except maybe NRA calendars. Put a 1500-square-foot building out back with lots of room for musical instruments, tools, and storage. Give me two acres or more to grow food. I’m done. Let me live there until I die. You would have to hold me at gunpoint to get me to leave that house to go to paradise.

Forget antiques. Forget rugs; they hold dirt and stains and smells. Forget hardwood. It rots, termites eat it, and it makes noise. Put a drain in the kitchen floor so I can spill things. Tile the kitchen walls all the way to the ceiling. Get me white dishes and cups from a restaurant supply house, and put in a deck oven for pizza. Kill every plant that isn’t grass or something that produces food. Give me an entire room for Maynard and Marvin. That’s luxury!

The “stronghold” concept is well known among Christians. Satan has spiritual strongholds we have to conquer. The Canaanite cities Joshua destroyed are symbolic of these strongholds. Addictions and bad habits are strongholds. Bad attitudes are strongholds. A physical illness or poverty may be a stronghold. We’re supposed to break these things down by spiritual warfare.

It has occurred to me that God has strongholds, too. Every human believer is described as a house or a temple or an embassy. We belong to the nation of heaven, even though we live on earth. Within us–within our “walls”–God’s ways prevail. And we have to strive to keep Satan out, and we pray in the Spirit to build ourselves up, so there is something stronger than Satan within us, to repel attackers.

Similarly, a Christian’s home can be a stronghold. It can be an embassy of God. That’s what I want. I know life isn’t supposed to be a breeze, but we’re supposed to live in victory, and it seems to me that within our homes, Satan should be relatively powerless. A stronghold home should be a place where a Christian can retreat and recharge. We have to fight the enemy everywhere else. At home, we should have more peace.

A home should be like a military garrison. You defend it and keep it free from invaders, and from time to time, you make excursions into enemy territory and do damage. Then you retreat back to the garrison and prepare for your next assault.

This is what I want. I don’t want fancy furniture or snooty neighbors or a location shallow people would crave. I want a fortress where I can find a little relief.

Before the clutter show, I say a show called American Pickers, about two guys who go around talking old people into selling them valuable antiques below the market price. They went to visit a man who had twelve buildings full of junk. They had a hard time persuading him to sell them anything. He had to be 75 years old, and this stuff was falling apart, but time after time, they would show him a rusty object and ask the price, and he would tell them it wasn’t for sale. It seemed to me that this guy was in the same boat as the hoarders. He’s going to die, and all that neglected, decaying stuff will be loaded up in dumptrucks and destroyed so the new owners will be able to use the buildings. Crazy.

I also caught a few minutes of a show called Intervention. You can probably guess what that’s about. I plan to record it from now own. It’s helpful to see how tough professional addiction counselors are. It reminded me of an important truth: if you don’t fix a loved one who has an addiction–if you withdraw and wait for them to change, and it doesn’t happen–it doesn’t mean you didn’t try to help. It means the addict didn’t try. Every bad thing that happens to an addict as the result of not trying is the addict’s fault. If someone asks you why you’re not helping, say, “Shouldn’t you be asking why the addict isn’t trying?” Don’t fall for blame-shifting. If you accept even the smallest particle of blame, you might as well be handing the addict a bottle of pills.

It’s funny how I happened to tune in to three very instructive shows, on a night when I was just trying to find entertainment while I communed with my pets. Dang these “coincidences.” They are swarming on me.

Woe to Thee, O Land, When Thy King is a Child

Are we finally reaching the point where gravity catches up with us and we have to admit we can’t finance the future by eating it?

The Dow is down over eighty points, and we just had two days that were even worse. Sooner or later, before we can have a real recovery, somebody somewhere has to make some money–has to create some wealth–and given our unemployment figures, that doesn’t seem to be happening. And we still have a gigantic glut of foreclosed homes the banks are sitting on. They can’t hold them forever. Eventually, they’re going to be put on the market or bulldozed. It will be interesting to see what happens to home loans and property values.

Because we borrowed an astronomical amount of money to finance the recovery, in the future, we have to make more money than usual in order to have the same prosperity we had in the past. It’s just like a student loan; you borrow money when you’re 20, and by the time you pay it off, every pizza you ate in college cost $50. What happens when you graduate with debt and then can’t get a job? That’s America’s situation.

Where is the evidence that we’re going to do better in 2015 than we did in 2005? Why would anyone think that was possible, let alone likely? And if we try to solve the problem by inflating the currency, we’ll just end up with larger numbers of smaller dollars. We’ll all be millionaires, and nobody will have a second pair of shoes. It’s still poverty, no matter how you look at it. We may be able to cheat the Chinese via inflation, but we’ll also be burning our cash reserves.

I don’t know why God provided me with silver coins, but it looks like I should be happy about it. I inherited a bunch of circulated silver coins from my grandfather. He snapped them up after Johnson turned our money into steel slugs. Seemed crazy at the time, but if we have a depression, I’ll be able to buy bread.

People think silver coins are worthless. They’re ignorant. The coins are 90% silver.

I just looked it up. My nickels are worth a dollar each. The dimes are worth over a dollar. The quarters are worth over three dollars. Wish I had enough of them to keep me alive for a year or two. Maybe I should buy some.

Gold is fine, but in a depression, it would be hard to spend. Owning gold would be like carrying thousand-dollar bills. A piece the size of a sesame seed would buy a dozen eggs. That’s useless. They don’t make coins that small. And what are you going to do, if you own it? Run a smelter in your kitchen? Forget it. Even if you could cut your gold into small pieces, no one would trust it. This is why mints exist. The purpose of a mint isn’t to make coins. It’s to make coins people can trust. Otherwise, private enterprises would be making gold coins diluted with copper and brass.

A silver coin, unlike a gold coin, will have a useful value. One of my dimes is worth a dozen eggs. Spending gold will be very difficult, but handing over a dime and grabbing a dozen eggs will be simple. Gold will only be useful if you’re buying a car or real estate. Or you’ll be able to trade it for silver, at a loss.

People say you don’t have to have precious metal in your possession in order to use it. You can trade it electronically. Good luck with that. If things get weird, I don’t want my money in the vault of some metals dealer three thousand miles away, waiting for him to declare bankruptcy and disappear. Savings accounts are insured by the government. Gold? No. When it’s gone, it’s gone. You can have private insurance, but would you trust it? Look at AIG. And the insurance wouldn’t compensate you in gold. You’d get worthless paper dollars. Better to stuff a few bags of silver in a deposit box at a local bank. If the bank fails, money will vanish, but goods in deposit boxes will remain.

If Obama and the Fed manage to eat our savings by printing money, what will we have left? Subsistence agriculture and bread lines. People in cities will starve. It may be especially bad in Florida, where we are suffering an unprecedented wave of blights and exotic pests. Oranges are probably going to get very scarce over the next five years because citrus greening is incurable. We may lose our bananas. Growing tomatoes here is already very hard; without chemicals, it can’t be done.

What do you do when you live in Miami and times get hard? The fish and peacocks and ducks would disappear in two months. Squirrels and pigeons would follow. You can’t grow enough fruit to live on, if you have a typical lot. It’s hard to grow vegetables here, and most lots are small anyway. Many homes here have topsoil six inches deep. Under that, it’s pure coral.

I never pray for God to fix things for us. Not exactly. I pray that we will turn to him and submit to him because of our problems, and that he’ll give us recovery only after that happens. We won’t learn anything from an unconditional handout. It would be a false kindness, and God doesn’t deal in those. I actually pray he will maintain the recession until we have revival. Otherwise, the suffering will be in vain. I also ask that he end the recession for those who have turned to him already.

Obama thinks a chicken can make a living by eating its own eggs. Everything he tells us goes against common sense, history, and basic economics. Borrowing only leads to prosperity when you reasonably anticipate that the borrowed money will enable you to make enough money to repay it. Otherwise, the result is bankruptcy. Can a nation declare bankruptcy? I guess so, but it won’t protect us from harsh consequences. We may weasel out of our debts by devaluing the currency, but we’ll all become poorer, and we’ll have to pay higher interest to China the next time they lend to us. This is how bad credit works. Everything costs more. But it’s worth it, so we can have essential government services, such as the subsidy of multimillion-dollar studies to tell us why trout can’t fly.

I think we’re going to have labor pains for a while. Things will get better and then worse, over and over, until the big collapse comes. The fluctuations will warn people and help those who are teachable to make preparations. Hopefully I’ll be ready. Life isn’t perfect when you’re in good standing with God, but it’s a whole lot better.

Global Warming Apparently Comes in Spurts

WE’RE HAVING A HEAT WAVE! IT’S 58 DEGREES OUTSIDE! LET’S ALL GO SKINNY-DIPPING! FINALLY THE AGONY IS OVER! IT’S GOING TO BE 74 DEGREES TODAY! AND THEN TOMORROW NIGHT, IT’S GOING TO BE A WARM AND TOASTY 34!

WHAT?!?!?!?!?!?!

Thirty-FOUR? FAHRENHEIT? Did I wake up in Minnesota?

I have to check Weather Underground again. This can’t be right.

It is right! And we’re going to have an eighty-percent chance of precipitation! I’M BUYING A SLED!

I guess Al Gore doesn’t have to worry about being tarred and feathered while it’s too cold to pour the tar.

I can’t recall a single winter when we had weather like this. It sounds like it’s going to be snowing in Orlando. I am so tired of wearing long pants and real shoes INDOORS because the central air can’t cope with anything lower than fifty-five degrees.

Maybe this would be a good day to get another space heater. Surely Home Depot has restocked after the initial terror.

Will this kill any of the bugs or animals that have been driving us nuts? It’s too late to help the citrus.

Thank God I’m getting over this disease. I am desperate to attend my weekly prayer group again. Tomorrow I’ll put on my liberal-mortifying George Bush Carhartt chore coat and drive up to Denny’s to see the other guys.

Oh, man. I have like thirty grapefruit ripening. I may have to freeze ten gallons of juice. My bananas! I have to pick the bananas!

At least we’re having a real winter. It’s kind of a bummer when you go a whole winter with no good sleep weather.

I’ll enjoy this warm and muggy day while it lasts.

Falling Faster Than Support for Global Warming Hoax

It’s under 50 degrees. Wow. For Miami, on a sunny day, that’s freakish. All over Florida, ill-designed central heating systems are failing at their jobs. People are wearing bizarre cold-weather ensembles that look weird because Miamians don’t know how to put the look together. I guarantee you, if you drive around Miami this morning, you will see at least one person wearing a wool hat, a heavy coat, and shorts.

I wouldn’t mind the cold weather at all, but for the fact that I’m recovering from a viral illness, and one of the symptoms is a low body temperature. Every night I pile on three blankets and crank the heated mattress pad up. Last night, it was merely adequate.

I’m one of the few people who has witnessed snow in Miami. When I was in high school, we had a really nasty day, and while I was standing in what we called “the quadrangle” (a yard surrounded by school buildings), I looked up and saw a few flakes in the air. I guess everything is okay as long as that doesn’t happen again.

I talked to Mike this week, and he predicted dead iguanas would be flopping out of trees. I guess that will happen. And some of our fish will float up to the surface of canals.

I wonder if the pythons will suffer. We have loads of them out in the filthy bug-infested ugly swamp majestic Everglades. They come from India and Burma. I don’t know how cold it gets there.

There are worries about the citrus crop. I don’t know if there is any point in trying to save Florida citrus. There is a new disease out there, and many people think it will end Florida citrus (maybe all commercial citrus growing) permanently, or at least until resistant trees are developed. It’s called Citrus Greening. A bug from Asia bites your tree, and that’s the end of it. I have several trees that aren’t doing well. I’m going to have to kill them. Limes and grapefruit seem to be immune, but everything else is looking bad.

I don’t know what to plant to replace the citrus. Mameys are okay. Mangoes are a reliable standby.

Citrus is in trouble, and there is a banana blight out there somewhere. I don’t think it has hit Florida yet, but experts fear it will wipe bananas out. They’re all descended from the same ancestor, and they don’t have enough genetic diversity to develop resistance. Supposedly.

Imagine not being able to order orange juice in a restaurant. Some people think that day is coming. They think orange juice will only be available in small quantities, as a mixer. I think we’ll have resistant trees. But until they show up, we’ll have problems.

I can’t believe the diseases and bugs we have here. You can’t have a tomato plant. You can barely grow peppers. Beans get rust. The Jamaican Tall coconut palms are long gone. The banyan trees and ficus hedges are dying. If it weren’t for poison, no one in South Florida could keep the ants and roaches at bay; cleanliness doesn’t do the job. Now we’re losing our citrus. In a couple of years, we’ll be eating MREs.

Why can’t the diseases hit fruit nobody cares about? I wouldn’t miss Surinam cherries. They’re disgusting. Guavas are very overrated. Papayas smell like dog poo. Loquats…a lot of people don’t even know what a loquat is. I’ve only eaten about eight longans over the course of my life. Sea grapes are pretty useless. The dates here don’t get ripe because of the climate. Take that stuff. Leave the tangelos.

I don’t know what to do with my papaya trees. They’re big, and they produce, but the fruit smells like dog excrement. It seems like you can avoid the smell by picking them early, but that practice hasn’t proved reliable.

Time to move to southern Tennessee. That’s the ticket. Tomatoes grow just fine there. Corn. Potatoes. Apples. Tasty pigs.

I’ll bet yankees are going to the beach today. This is one of the funnier things about living in Florida. People who spend money on vacations are so determined to get what they paid for, they’ll subject themselves to incredible suffering. They go to the beach when it’s 50 degrees. They go fishing in six-foot seas. They literally blister themselves on their first day here, and then THEY GO BACK AND LIE IN THE SUN THE NEXT DAY. That’s so horrible, I don’t even like typing it. Have you ever seen sun poisoning? It’s painful just to be near it.

When it comes to traditional South Florida pursuits, I’m no fan of the cold. If the water is under 80 degrees, I have no interest in swimming. If the air is below 72 degrees, count me out of the fishing trip. Cool weather is great for yard work and barbecue, but you won’t see me near the water.

If you’ve never had a pool thermometer, you probably don’t know how cold 75-degree water is. It sounds pleasant, because 75-degree air is pleasant. But it’s pretty cold. Water has to be much warmer than air to have the same feel. I’ve seen canal water hit 94 degrees here.

One of the interesting things about cold snaps is that they’re the only times we have cold running water. The rest of the year, we have hot and warm. The cold water tap comes out at about 80. It does a very poor job of cooling beer when you’re homebrewing.

If we ever had ice, there would be bodies all over the streets. Miamians can barely drive when it’s dry and clear. They are the least skilled drivers outside of Asia. Italian driving philosophy combined with Chinese ability and Somali judgment. If there was anything to slide on, the feds would have to bring refrigerated trucks in to hold the dead.

When I was a kid, we had a place in North Carolina. A lot of people from Miami have invaded that area. They make people crazy, because they can’t drive on hills. They have no idea what low gears are for. They ride their brakes until they give out. They creep along in terror, with long lines of better drivers behind them. I learned to drive in Kentucky, so I don’t have the local disease. I still remember my mother cursing at them.

I would never want another place in North Carolina. The whole point is to get away from Miamians, and they’re already there. It’s like the scene in Alien where Ripley finds out the creature stowed away with her on the shuttle. It’s not fair! Go be rude and loud somewhere else! If I wanted to see your Lord of the Flies kids running around screaming in restaurants while you yell into your cell phones and pretend not to notice, I would have stayed home!

Maybe it’s time to cut back on caffeine again.

“Quiet” Tool-Obsessed Neighbor Amassed Arsenal of Lethal Peppers

I decided to torture my virus with more hot food. I hit the store and got ingredients for doro wat. The plan was to make it even hotter than the curry I made a few days ago. I picked four habanero golds plus one big Trinidad Scorpion to season it.

Now I have the stew bubbling on the stove, but it seems like the virus just went away. My head opened up, and I feel much better. Maybe it was the fumes from the burning onions, toasting spices, and minced peppers. Or maybe I’m really cured.

I have to ask myself: do I still want to eat this stuff if I’m not sick?

Of course I do. Let’s not kid ourselves.

I’m planning to make rotis instead of injera. I can’t help it. Rotis are better. And I bought sour cream to wrap up in there with the doro wat.

Tomorrow I may have something that makes a virus seem pleasant.

More

Ohhh…that was amazing. My brain actually melted and ran down my throat. I can’t say I miss it. I haven’t used it since 1996.

Take my word for it. Rotis are ten times better than injera. Dump a big pile of doro wat on one, make sure there’s a boiled egg in there somewhere, add a big blog of sour cream, fold it up like a burrito, and GO.

Can’t Get a Permit for a Moat

I bought some elephant tur…”concrete buttons” today. These are the round concrete domes people put on their lawns to discourage drivers from using the grass as a highway. For a long time, the only name I knew for these objects referred to elephant droppings, and then I heard “berm,” and now I find that the people who sell them call them “concrete buttons,” so I am relieved to know the generally accepted term.

Some character who drives in this area early in the morning–almost certainly a newspaper delivery person–has been deliberately running over and moving my only elephant…my only concrete button. The yard is getting pretty torn up. This seems like a poor way to stimulate newspaper sales. He’s in for a surprise.

I considered getting buttons with holes in the middle and hammering rebar into the ground through them, with a little bit sticking up from the top of the buttons. This would make the buttons immovable and hole tires pretty quickly. But the object is not to cause damage. It’s to discourage idiocy. If the perpetrator doesn’t see the rebar, he’ll hit it, and then the deterrent will have failed. After that, there will be no hope of peace or change, and the newspaper guy and I will be like Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam.

It’s wonderful having a truck. In the past I would have had to borrow my dad’s ancient SUV and put the buttons in the back, making a mess. Today I backed the Death Star up to a gate, and a forklift pulled up and held the entire box of buttons over the truck bed while a guy unloaded them for me. Nice.

I spend time in prayer and study early every morning, and today I thought about the first psalm. It says we are to “meditate on the law day and night.” My assumption has been that as a Spirit-filled believer, I was to interpret this as an instruction to pray in the Spirit during the day. There are strong hints about this, which I am too lazy to repeat now. We believe the law, handed down at the first Shavuot, has been supplemented and to some extent superseded by the baptism of the Holy Spirit, which was handed down at Pentecost (Greek name for Shavuot) after the crucifixion.

I think I missed part of the picture. The great thing about the post-Pentecost era is that we get to mingle our strength with the unlimited power of the Spirit, and while the latter is unquestionably the big-ticket item, the former is important. So I think it’s important for Christians to meditate on (which means “repeat internally”) the scriptures during the day, especially during time that is otherwise idle. I have a rule, which I observe poorly: never wait. When you find yourself delayed for some reason, find something useful to do. This fills that time very productively.

Because God is a thoughtful planner, I am fairly well prepared for this. For a long time, I’ve been memorizing psalms. I keep losing bits of them, but I have a pretty substantial mental library built up. The psalms are no joke. Jesus and the Apostles used them all the time, as did Satan when he tempted Jesus. They have power. Memorized scripture is the sword of the Spirit. It’s a weapon. It worked for Jesus. So it’s not like I’m just armed with meaningless poetry.

I’ve been making an effort to think on memorized psalms when my time is free, and it’s wonderful. It brings peace, and it reminds me of the power that is at work on my behalf. Very nice. It also helps me not to forget the things I’ve memorized. I recommend it. I’m not suggesting you have to do this in order to be a good Christian, but it appears to work.

I can never remember to do anything I purpose to do, so I asked for grace to be able to make myself do this, and so far, it’s working. I feel much better and more inclined to trust God. If you try this, or if you do it already, let me know what you think.

I learned something yesterday. I love watching Robert Morris, because I think God is telling him fantastic stuff about Spirit-filled living, but I think he may be wrong about something. He says he believes the Holy Spirit “owns” the spiritual gifts, and that any believer can exercise any gift. I’m sure this is true, to the extent that God can do whatever he wants with any believer (or with donkey or a rock or a stick) at any time, but I think we are wrong to believe that generally, the gifts are universal. Robert Morris seems to teach that if you have one gift, you have them all, all the time.

I thought he was right, simply because so much of the rest of his teaching was right on target, but I now think he’s wrong.

Here’s a bit from 1 Corinthians 12:

Now to each one the manifestation of the Spirit is given for the common good. To one there is given through the Spirit the message of wisdom, to another the message of knowledge by means of the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by that one Spirit, to another miraculous powers, to another prophecy, to another distinguishing between spirits, to another speaking in different kinds of tongues, and to still another the interpretation of tongues. All these are the work of one and the same Spirit, and he gives them to each one, just as he determines.

Here is more:

Now the body is not made up of one part but of many. If the foot should say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. And if the ear should say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” it would not for that reason cease to be part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the sense of hearing be? If the whole body were an ear, where would the sense of smell be? But in fact God has arranged the parts in the body, every one of them, just as he wanted them to be. If they were all one part, where would the body be? As it is, there are many parts, but one body.

You can look at the first passage and say that it doesn’t expressly rule out the Morris interpretation. The fact that God gives different gifts to different believers at various times doesn’t mean those believers can’t operate in all of the other gifts at other times. But why would Paul write the second passage, if different believers did not have different gifts, generally? There would be no reason to write the passage. Why would one believer think himself better or worse than another, with regard to the gifts, if he had exactly what everyone else had?

If you read 1 Corinthians, you will see more evidence that his interpretation is shaky. I am too lazy to quote all of it.

Not a big deal, but worth noting.

Mr. Kalashnikov’s Latest Must-Have

Last night I finally got to work on my Saiga 12 conversion.

For those of you who are behind the Bible-and-gun-clinging curve, the Saiga 12 is an AK-47 12-gauge shotgun. It’s magical. Low recoil, a clip instead of a tubular magazine [someone tell me the right name for "clip" and I'll put it in, but "magazine" obviously doesn't work], and AK reliability and simplicity, plus you can get one for 500 bucks. Hmm…way over a thousand for a Gucci semiauto that holds fewer rounds and has a lame tubular magazine, or $500 for an AK that shoots buckshot? Real hard choice there.

For reasons too boring to go into, the government makes the Russians put a bunch of pansy parts on the Saiga, in order to make it resemble a sporting gun. Picture yourself hunting ducks with this thing. Insane. As soon as you buy one, you’re supposed to buy other parts to make it work properly. You move the trigger forward, add a pistol grip, and get rid of the silly Elmer-Fudd-style buttstock. You can also get magazines holding up to 12 rounds, but for some reason, the 8-round jobs are favored.

You have to drill out rivets and mill off unneeded tabs and so on. I got my parts a long time ago, but I didn’t have machine tools, so I put off doing the conversion. Last night I decided to attack.

The milling machine made the work a lot less nerve-wracking. I got the rivets out without damaging the gun. Putting the new fire control group (“trigger and stuff”) in the gun was a horror. The Tapco parts I ordered did not come with instructions, so there was a lot of painful trial and error. My fingers are sore today, but I got the parts in there. I still have to add everything up and make sure the result is legal.

Now the trigger spring needs to be bent. Kalashnikovs come with strange springs made of twisted wires, and they’re sloppily made. The one I have isn’t bent correctly. It didn’t matter with the old parts, but the new parts don’t like it. Only one arm of the spring is doing anything, so there isn’t much pressure on the trigger, which means it can release the hammer with very little provocation. As a result, when you cock the gun, it doesn’t stay cocked. The hammer falls when the bolt goes forward. I would guess that if I tried to shoot it, the result would be rapid fire, followed by hilarity with the range officers and the power-mad goons fine public servants at the BATF.

I wanted to ship the gun to a smith who does conversions, but thanks to Obama, they are backed up until the year 3000.

The finish on this gun is horrible. It’s a crinkly black coating which flakes off when you look at it hard. And the area that used to be covered by the old trigger guard is bare. I’m going to have to put something on it. I’ll take a look and see if the professionals are still backed up. If not, I’ll send it off. If I can’t do that, I’ll have to use one of the coatings they sell for home use. That will require blasting the parts. What a pain. On the up side, the sight of me doing this in the front yard will have a positive effect on the attitudes of my neighbors.

In the meantime, I guess I can cover the bare areas with Super Blue.

I still have to mill some stuff off. It makes me nervous, putting the gun in my machining vise. I put wooden shims beside it and paper towels under it. Seems to work.

It looks like the Jacobs chuck I got on Ebay, trying to save money, is a piece of junk. With a small drill bit, the runout nearly exceeds the bit’s diameter. With a large bit, the chuck keeps falling off the arbor. I don’t think the arbor is the problem. I can indicate it and see. My used Albrecht chuck is perfect; I just assumed a Jacobs chuck that looked good in photos would be okay. Wrong.

My father is all interested in Martin County, which is up the coast a ways. He wants a waterfront place. I would much prefer inland. I want land around me when cling to my reactionary paraphernalia and grow food and can beans. A waterfront house on half an acre costs more than a mansion–that term is no exaggeration–on five or ten acres farther inland.

The older I get, the less boating does for me. It’s a lot of work. The boat always has mechanical problems which I have to fix (or fail to fix after hours in the sweaty, greasy bilge). I invariably get sunburned. I can’t get my friends to learn to do things for themselves, like tying knots and rigging baits, and they often show up hung over. Also, Miami boaters are even ruder than Miami landlubbers, which is saying a great deal. They make fishing unpleasant. My dad enjoys it tremendously, though, so that makes it worthwhile for me. It appears that it will negatively affect our choice of properties, however.

Given the giant differential between waterfront and inland real estate prices, coupled with the collapse of the Florida real estate market, I suppose there is no reason why I couldn’t get some land of my own, not too far from our compound. That would mean paying for additional razor wire and land mines. And of course, a second pair of Rottweilers trained to eat Jehovah’s Witnesses, Omaha Steaks representatives, and mimes. And burglars and murderers, I guess, although they don’t disturb me nearly as much.

Have you seen the Omaha Steaks people? Them and the other food truck guys? It’s very sad. The companies that sell this dubious food convince them to blow their savings on refrigerated pickups full of things no one wants, and here is their sales secret: knock on the door, start backing up toward your truck, and say you want to show the mark something. If you want to freak one out, don’t budge. The natural human instinct is to follow someone who says he wants to show you something. If you don’t move, it ruins the pitch.

You never see those guys twice. I guess they all go out of business. It’s awful to con someone into investing in a business you know is almost certain to fail. Especially when it involves sales, which is full of psychic trauma to begin with.

If I were going north by myself, I’d be looking at northern Georgia and southern Tennessee. I love Eastern Kentucky, but it’s a depressing place. People just don’t do well there; it’s as if the land rejects them. And the corruption, racism, and unnecessary ignorance wear me down. It’s bad enough that I have to hear the word “nigger” in rap music pouring out of car windows. I don’t need to hear it from people I know, in my own living room. One of the great things about charismatic churches in the South is that they’re destroying racism. It would be nice to live in an area where charismatics are big.

Some areas of Appalachia are more blessed than others; that’s the simple truth. Maybe I could find one. I keep thinking about the area around Chattanooga. Check this property out: CLICK. How about that? Room for a garden! It also has a basement for MACHINE TOOLS. The price is $265,000, so call it 250. Down here, that gets you a 2-bedroom shed in Little Havana with a Cuban-style paved yard. And this house is in an area full of holy rollers, so I’ll fit right in. “The Lord told me I needed a surface grinder and a Barrett .50-caliber rifle.” “You TOO?” “I got a couple I’m trying to sell.” “My mom is believing for a new AR-15.”

Somebody I believe to be honest and in touch with God claims the US is headed for a famine. He says this has been revealed to him. I wonder if it’s true. So many Christians are bugging out.

I can’t relate to the desire to be in a big flashy town. I have always been disgusted and bored by social climbing, and I cook so well, I have little enthusiasm for restaurants. Cultural offerings tend to be pretty sordid these days. I don’t go to movies or concerts. I have never had any inclination to support a sports team associated with a city; I find the concept perverse and tiresome. There is a kind of shallowness associated with a desire to be in big, well-known cities. I would rather live among nice people, with a little ground around me. Hopefully God will see fit to find the right place for me.

I Feel Like an Old Person Under Obama’s Health Plan

It is 71.8 degrees outside. This is the greatest day of my life. Nearly. It’s supposed to be about 61° at ten p.m.

When you let your yard go to hell, hot weather is okay. When you actually care about maintaining your home, it’s another story. It’s very tough working outdoors in Miami in the months of June through October. Your sunglasses fill with sweat so you can’t see. You have to apply sunblock once an hour. The sweat makes the sunblock run into your eyes. This is why we have illegal immigrants; to them, the suffering is worth it.

I may go out and poison the yard today. It needs weed killer, fertilizer, and imidacloprid. The clouds of buzzing whiteflies are getting hard to see through. Something needs to be done.

I took a look at my plantains this morning. People told me my trees wouldn’t produce in Miami. I don’t know where they got that idea. My French Horn plantain tree seems to be more productive than my bananas. I can’t even guess what I’ll do with a long bunch of one-pound fruit, but I’m glad I’m getting them.

Now that it’s cool enough to do things, it’s hard to decide what to start with.

Maybe the best thing is to think it over while eating pie.

Okay, no pie.

Tires!

Here’s a snippet from an email from someone I know who travels around and meets a lot of Christians:

I’m north of Atlanta and I also met 4 ladies yesterday here in GA.
Again – Guns and God and preparation! And it’s not just talk now.
People are doing it. Amazing.

What on earth is going on? People aren’t conspiring to make this happen. It’s not deceitful, contrived, Obama-style Astroturfing perpetrated by professional liars. This is the real thing.

Yesterday my dad started talking seriously about moving north. A long time ago, I told him I was considering moving out of this seedy and unpleasant county, and he said he thought that was a great idea, so instead of looking for a relatively small place for me to buy, we started looking at a bigger place for him to buy. A compound! Now the plan is back on the table.

We’ll need razor wire. Motion sensors. Rottweilers. Soap cannons and deodorant mines to repel hippies. I have shopping to do.

I’m going to see if we can get out of Miami in the near future and look at some properties. There is nothing here for me. Most of my friends have left town. I no longer have an office. My only important connection is my church, and I could move eighty miles north of here and still be able to attend. Or I could find a new church.

I would absolutely love to move to south Tennessee or northern Georgia. I could never get my dad to do that, however, and I think he needs to have family nearby, so I can’t very well do it without him.

I stuck new tires on the truck today. Very nice. I could swear they ride smoother and more quietly, but that could be my imagination. They seem to track better. The old ones seemed to make the truck ramble around a little. Now I’m prepared for SHTF driving.

They didn’t charge me sales tax. Can’t figure that out. Maybe today is a tax holiday.

For a couple of years, Perry Stone has been predicting heavy-duty economic problems for the US. He doesn’t claim to know the day when it will hit, but he thinks food will be scarce. Back in 2008, he said he thought people who owned their homes outright would be better off than everyone else. I guess that’s always true.

I’m going to start canning sausage, and I have to think about other stuff that would be good to have around if the power went off. You can always buy prepackaged food, but why not have things you actually enjoy? Shuck beans! Pickled beans! Dried apples! Country ham! Live better on your survival rations than you do when you use stores.

What else do I need? Maybe another crate of ammunition for the K31. Unbelievably, I can buy GP11 locally.

I keep thinking a nuclear blast or WMD attack on US soil is on the way. The Fort Hood incident proves we are not doing enough to thwart Muslim kooks. We’re spending lots of money, but a huge percentage of it is wasted harassing harmless non-Muslims for the sake of political correctness. If an Army doctor can place calls to Al Qaeda and repeatedly announce his anti-American sentiments without even getting reprimanded, Muslims can bring an atomic bomb into New York harbor. Sooner or later, we’re going to reap the harvest of self-hatred and empty liberal grandstanding. We’ll turn on our televisions and see a smoking ruin that used to be the New York Stock Exchange or the US Capitol. Then the real recession will start, and the only people who will get through it without eating their pets and drinking from puddles will be the Bible clingers and home-schoolers out in the woods.

When people who should know better do unbelievably stupid things over and over, it means there is a spiritual cause. I believe that. I believe this is what caused the real estate collapse. A monkey could have seen it coming, yet brilliant investors and financiers could not. Now the people who are supposed to protect us are clamoring about a nonexistent anti-Muslim backlash instead of screaming about our failure to take action against domestic terrorists. Media “experts” are moaning about Nidal Hasan’s imagined “pre-post-traumatic stress syndrome” when they should be noting his Muslim fanaticism. When people behave this stupidly, the supernatural is at work. Our guard is being taken down by occult forces so we will be open to an attack a sane America would have prevented as a matter of course.

This shows how weak the flesh is when God is against you. We think we can take care of ourselves, but without his protection, we are as stupid as lemmings.

I hope I’m not here when things really start popping. I want to be at least a hundred miles away, with my shelves loaded with tasty home-canned grub and my Saiga 12 loaded with law-enforcement-only buckshot.

I Can Wear Long Pants

Cold weather is coming. I’m excited beyond words.

By “cold,” I mean below 80°. That’s sufficient as far as I’m concerned. It means I’ll be able to go outside for more than three minutes without worrying about my shirt sticking to me when I come back inside.

We had a hot September and August. Al Gore would be thrilled. Now we’re getting weather in the lower 80s, and it actually feels cool.

Yesterday I was able to load manure in the truck and put it on the fruit trees. I could have done this in the summer, but heat, broiling sunshine, streaming sweat, and airborne manure and fertilizer were not a combination I wanted to face. I put manure, fertilizer, epsom salt, and Ironite on the mangoes, bananas, plantains, and some of the other trees. I replaced my dying impatiens with new victims and manured the flowerbed. I feel like these were major accomplishments.

We are told to do stuff like this as though we were doing it for God himself. Arrgh. Okay! Okay! I’ll do it. But…arrgh.

I didn’t fully understand how high my truck’s bed was until yesterday. I had to stack big bags of manure in it, and the tailgate was at chest height. That’s not very convenient. I looked around on the web, and I found that some people lower their beds. Evidently, you don’t need to have your bed way up in the air unless you’re towing. Futhermore, I would guess that Dodge makes the bed higher than it has to be, for the strange people who jack their trucks as high as possible.

I don’t understand the truck-raising fad. It makes a truck less safe to drive, and it makes it hard to get in and out. It makes the bed hard to use. If you don’t use the bed, why get a truck? I think you have to be out of your mind to get a truck and then modify it so you can’t use the bed. Talk about expensive and totally useless fashion accessories. It makes a $10,000 Chanel suit seem like a good buy. If your truck is primarily a toy, and you like customizing it like a Harley, more power to you. I just want to be able to use mine. I already have a Harley. From a functional standpoint, it’s pathetic and useless. The footboards drag when I turn. I don’t need any more silliness in my life.

I don’t know anything about four-wheeling, but I have seen people claim that raising a truck makes it more suitable for going off-road. Is that really true? The ground clearance doesn’t change at all. The axles don’t rise with the truck. You can add axle height by using ridiculous oversize tires which don’t really work with your suspension. I don’t know why I’d want to do that. It effectively lowers the final drive ratio, and the tires are expensive, and it looks stupid.

When I was a kid, I rode in what I thought was the ultimate off-road vehicle. It was a dune buggy made with VW Beetle parts. This thing would go places a truck or Jeep could never go. It was just a cage with two seats. Two-wheel drive. You could go straight up the side of a hill with it. You could drive it straight into a curb a foot high and barely feel the bump when you went over it. Wonderful vehicle. I think if I had a desire to drive around in the dirt, I’d get something like that instead of ruining an expensive truck and getting inferior performance.

My truck has four spacers in it that raise the bed. You can take them out from between the rear springs and axle and put them above the springs. This drops the bed over an inch. I may do that. It’s reversible. It would be great to have the bed three or four inches lower, if there’s a cheap way to do it without causing problems when there’s a load on the springs.

People who lower their trucks get a lot of ridicule from people who raise theirs. Common sense has a way of drawing hostility from those who lack it. I would have to be demented to take this gigantic truck out in the mud and try to use it as an all-terrain vehicle. It will never happen. It would be like using an ocean liner to go bass fishing. I am never going to have to worry about rocks hitting the underside of the body. Might as well bring the bed down where I can use it.

When I was working on the truck, installing Nerf bars and a rear-view camera, I was amazed at how easy it was. I could lie on the ground under the truck and reach up without bending my arms much. The T-bird, on the other hand, was so low I couldn’t get a low-profile jack under it. I wouldn’t want to go back to T-bird ground clearance, but I don’t need two feet or whatever it is that I have now.

Last night I watched Robert Morris again. He did a sermon on faith. He says we should not have faith in things happening. I may be phrasing that wrong. Charismatics tend to venture into a practice called “name it and claim it,” in which they pray for things in the name of Jesus, state that they have them, and then wait for God to hand them over. I believe he was criticizing this.

He pointed out that we sometimes pray for things and believe we will receive them, only to be disappointed. That’s true. He said we should learn that we’re supposed to use our faith to bring us close to God. He pointed out that lots of faith-filled believers have been martyred and tortured and so on, and that they did not lose their faith. Surely they prayed to be spared. The point of a faith-filled life is not to make God do stuff for us. It’s to get close to him and know him and receive grace to submit to him and do his will. Bad things will happen to us, and it doesn’t mean we’re failures as Christians. If we have faith, God will make these things work out to our benefit, even if we don’t receive that benefit in this life. I think I’m summing it up fairly well. Maybe not.

Anyway, he said we often believe for things that are not God’s will, and that when we do that, we’re effectively exalting our will above his.

Here is where I come down on this. I think he’s absolutely right, as long as you don’t read anything extraneous into what he said.

Our lives are supposed to be victorious, but not without suffering. Even the two witnesses in the book of Revelation–extraordinarily powerful prophets–will be slaughtered. Many men of God have been tortured and killed. Paul was flogged over and over. Stephen was murdered by an angry mob. It only makes sense that the rest of us should sustain painful losses from time to time. On the other hand, I know for a fact that it’s often possible to claim something God has promised to you and to maintain your faith and receive it. This has happened to me; I was miraculously healed back in 1987, and I actually saw the guilty spirit leave my body. The 91st psalm says, “His truth shall be thy shield and buckler.” I believe this refers to standing on God’s promises.

I think the important thing to consider is whether you have any right to what you’re claiming. Don’t ask for things that will distance you from God. For some people, even ordinary, reasonable blessings like a steady job and a reliable car can be causes for forgetting the real source of prosperity. And you have to ask yourself whether there is anything in your life that will prevent you from receiving what you ask for. I think repentance and fasting and casting out spirits are very important. Paul said receiving communion in an unworthy manner could cause you to be sick or die; I think that shows what failure to repent can do.

I also think that a truly mature Christian is likely to receive warning when he faces adversity that God will not remove. The Jews in Babylon were told to build houses and get jobs, because they weren’t going home any time soon. Paul was told he would be imprisoned. Jesus knew he would be crucified. I believe Peter knew he would be executed, although I can’t say for sure he didn’t hear it from human beings. I suspect we are headed into an age where we are in closer touch with the Holy Spirit, and people will receive more information from him. There is a spiritual gift called the word of knowledge, in which God comes right out and tells you things. I think we’re going to see it operate more often in the future, as our knowledge and obedience increase. As persecution increases, I should add.

I hope I’m right or at least close to it.

To my knowledge, so far, I’ve experienced five of the gifts of the spirit. I can’t say I’ve experienced the word of knowledge, but Robert Morris says every gift is available to every believer. He says the idea that some people get this and other people get that is incorrect. If so, I suppose a word of knowledge will come if I ever need it. It would sure be nice to know better than to pray for things that aren’t going to happen.

Bigger Pantry Needed

I guess people get tired of reading things like this about the food I make, but…the sweet pickles I made turned out to be the best I’ve ever had. Even better than my grandmother’s. I can’t believe pickles can be this good. After a day in the fridge, the salt and seasonings did their thing, and the result was magnificent. Now I’m worried about having these things around. Dills are virtually calorie-free, but sweet pickles are loaded with sugar. I was miraculously delivered from gluttony back in August, but that doesn’t mean I need to tempt myself.

I’d post the recipe, but it came from a cookbook, so you ought to just get the book. Besides, I’m sure there are a million similar recipes on the web. I omitted the onions from the book receipe, and I used white sugar instead of brown. Other than that, it’s exactly what you’ll find in Shuck Beans, Stack Cakes, and Honest Fried Chicken.

Church was amazing last night, and this morning, I got a startling answer to prayer. Unfortunately, I can’t describe it in any detail, because it involves another person’s private business. All I can say is this: when you know someone whose behavior is atrocious, and you want to change it, fasting and prayer will give you surprising results. People have free will; no doubt about it. But that doesn’t mean God won’t work his persuasive powers on them. Besides, some bad behavior is due to demonic oppression, and your fasting can clear that up in another person.

This morning it occurred to me that I should always attack problems spiritually before acting in my own strength. I can’t say all problems are rooted in spiritual causes, although maybe they are. I can say that all problems should be attacked via spiritual warfare before we step in and screw things up with our blind bumbling. I think maybe this was what Jesus was getting at when he talked about turning the other cheek and so on. It wasn’t so much that it’s good to be a loser. His point, I think, was that your first response to hostility or adversity should be spiritual, not fleshly. Maybe I’m wrong. Either God put this stuff in my head, or it’s wrong, and I came up with it myself.

Last night at church, I told my pastor and one other person that things are going so well for me now that I don’t have any real problems. I have relatively trivial difficulties, but nothing major. I said that these days, it’s the people around me who have problems. They’re the ones I think I need to apply the bulk of my energy to. I may have sounded arrogant when I said all that. I certainly hope not; I was trying to comment on God’s goodness to me.

Here’s a funny thing about Christianity. When you talk about the great things God is doing for you, other people may take it as boasting. We’re all trying to get our lives sorted out and walk in blessings, so when someone else does well, it may seem like that person thinks he’s a better Christian than you. That’s not what I’m trying to say. I’m just saying…this stuff is WORKING.

The Psalms say, “My soul shall make her boast in the Lord. The humble [or 'needy'] shall hear thereof and be glad.” That seems to indicate the intelligent and constructive way to receive another person’s good news. If someone else gets something good, the smart thing is to try to find out what they did right.

I guess I was wrong to get up and do the Church Lady Superior Dance during the altar call. That, I regret.

I forgive the lady who sacked me and sat on me until the ushers arrived with the wheelbarrow. I wish I knew her name so I could return her weave. I probably shouldn’t be using it to dust my CD collection.

One of the funny problems I have right now is that my weight loss has made my skin break out. The weight loss has irritated my gall bladder, and the end result is slight skin problems. I guess I can live with that. It’s not like I have leprosy. Fifteen or twenty pounds from now, the weight loss should stop, and then I’ll be at equilibrium, so the stress to my body should go away.

Gall bladders are catch-22 organs. If you get fat, you become susceptible to gall bladder trouble. If you lose weight, during the process, you’re likely to have gall bladder flare-ups. Your gall bladder wants you to stay fat so it never gets well. Presumably, when I’m no longer fat or losing weight, I’ll be just fine.

I started taking a disgusting daily tonic of lime juice, olive oil, and oil of oregano, and I feel a whole lot better. And it gives me a use for my gigantic supply of fresh limes. Oil of oregano is loaded with terpenes, which are supposed to be hard on gallstones. It amazes me that medical science has absolutely no effective treatment for gall bladder disease. They know virtually nothing about preventing it. They don’t even try. I guess jerking gall bladders out at $5000 a pop is just too easy. Medical science has decided God made a mistake when he gave us gall bladders. They used to feel the same way about tonsils and appendices, but that’s changing. Bodies are like cars. I trust the engineers who design cars more than a slackjawed mechanic who tries to fix them.